Startupboy

NYC - Lead Developer / Founding Engineer (Ruby) at Centzy (http://centzy.com)

Centzy is a comparison shopping engine for local services (http://centzy.com). What Kayak does for flights and hotels, Centzy does for the everyday services in your neighborhood like haircuts, dry cleaners, and oil changes. It's a large, untapped market, and we are funded by great investors who share our passion: Lightbank (Groupon's original investor), ff Venture Capital (Klout's original investor) and ER Accelerator.

We are two startup guys (one hacker, one business) and we are looking for another hacker to join us. As our first hire, we would consider you a late co-founder (http://startupboy.com/2011/12/13/why-you-cant-hire/). We will compensate you as such (equity + salary) but also expect you to take significant product ownership and to help lead the development team. We're not picky about titles, but Lead Developer seems about right. You should be passionate about building great products and tackling big data and technology challenges. You should have deep experience in Ruby, Rails and Javascript. Experience with MongoDB is a plus.

We would prefer that you work with us in our sunny office in the Lower East Side of NYC. We share a co-working space with other startups so you'll get the benefit of being part of a larger community of fun and motivated entrepreneurs.

Please get in touch with your github profile, linkedin profile / resume, and a short description about an interesting project /…

This format is painful to read, so I'm copying the content here. This is a series of tweets by https://twitter.com/balajis

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If you are using software to go after a legacy physical vertical, we are most excited if you do it "full stack" [0].

With @counsyl, we found that one cannot live by bioinformatics alone. So built a full clinical lab + software + national salesforce.

Here is a video of our robotic genome factory: Also: insurance coverage, clearances, clinical integration... [1]

The reason to do full stack is that it's hard to replace just one layer of an outdated legacy stack. CAC & integration costs can kill.

For example, consider "restaurant powered by technology" vs "tech for restaurants". With code, reinvent industry and make better margins.

You cannot automate something till you've done it manually many times. You cannot abstract an API till you've seen many specific examples.

Need to build a site of the scale of http://Amazon.com - and encounter all the problems - before you could do http://aws.amazon.com .

Reinventing agriculture? Build new kind of farm, w/ solar panels & self-driving tractors. Control all factors, show that code cuts costs.

More examples of full stack startups.. Education: [2], Autos: [3], Hospitality: [4]

By doing it end-to-end, you see things. First, sometimes a good reason beyond tradition (eg regulatory, logistical) for legacy practices.

Second, your control of adjacent layers may eliminate the initial problem you were trying…

A little late to the party. I blame the hangover I had yesterday :)

Social Tables (http://www.socialtables.com), a funded, DC-based startup is looking for a Senior Developer/VP of Engineering (employee #1, wahoo!).

If you immediately thought that this startup makes databases social, you're the kind of person we're looking for and you'll fit right in. Please read on :)

Social Tables is the seating plan platform for events. You know how weddings, galas and other large events have assigned seating? Well, the biggest PITA in planning these events is figuring out how to seat guests (it can take weeks). Our cloud-based software solves that problem.

Since launching in May 2011, we've seated 43k guests at 450 different events. We're expanding rapidly through big strategic partnerships and aggressive customer acquisition.

In this role, your responsibilities will be to lead product development of our next version. We prefer Rails but if PHP is your weapon of choice, that's cool. You should also be proficient in JavaScript since things will be a little heavier on the client-side going forward.

You must be a motivated self-starter who is energized by teamwork and loves to learn new things.

Traction aside, right now is the perfect time to join Social Tables and we would love to tell you why. In addition to competitive compensation, you will get serious equity (we agree with Naval in his recent post on this issue - http://startupboy.com/2011/12/13/why-you-cant-hire/).

If this…

Growth
Mr. Money Moustache [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/]
Study Hacks, Cal Newport [http://calnewport.com/blog/]
Tim Ferriss [https://tim.blog/]
Oliver Emberton [oliveremberton.com]

Intellectual
Farnam Street, Shane Parrish [farnamstreetblog.com/blog]
Less Wrong [http://lesswrong.com/] [lesserwrong.com]
Raw Thought, Aaron Swartz [aaronsw.com/weblog]
Slate Star Codex [slatestarcodex.com]
Edge [http://edge.org/]
Melting Asphalt, Kevin Simler [http://www.meltingasphalt.com/]
Essays, Paul Graham [paulgraham.com/articles.html]
Minding Our Way, Nate Soares [http://mindingourway.com/]
Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao [ribbonfarm.com]
Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson [overcomingbias.com]
Shtetl-Optimized, Scott Aaronson [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/]
Raikoth, Scott Alexander [http://web.archive.org/web/20140220082152/http://raikoth.net:80/]
Heterodox Academy [https://heterodoxacademy.org/]

Technology
Hacker News [https://news.ycombinator.com/]
Worrydream, Bret Victor [http://worrydream.com/]
Naval Ravikant [https://startupboy.com/]
Unenumerated, Nick Szabo [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/]
Stratchery [http://stratchery.com/]

Statistics
DataTau [http://www.datatau.com/]
FiveThirtyEight [fivethirtyeight.com]
Simply Statistics [https://simplystatistics.org/]
Chris Olah [colah.github.io]

Economics
Marginal Revolution [marginalrevolution.com]
Project Syndicate [project-syndicate.org]

Naval, founder of Angel List, has described[1] this and many other excitign usages of Bitcoin, going beyond basic money transfer:

Everyone has a copy of the Bitcoin block chain, so anyone can verify your transactions. You can write software that will crawl the block chain and generate automatic accounting histories for tax and verification purposes. You can engaged in “Trusted Timestamping” – take a cryptographic signature of any document, timestamp it, and put it into the block chain. Anyone can verify that the document existed at a given time. If you sign the document with your private key and another party signs it with theirs, it becomes an undeniable mutually-signed contract. This entirely eliminates notaries and websites like https://www.proofofexistence.com/ are showing the concept. The Namecoin project is building a distributed Domain Name System that allocates and resolve Domain Names without needing ICANN or Verisign, by using the block chain to establish proof-of-ownership.

Really worth a read.

[1] http://startupboy.com/2013/11/07/bitcoin-the-internet-of-money/

Hi Larry,

I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times.

You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap.

If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested:

https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/

https://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowdfunding/

http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols